Tagged: pledge

A few days ago, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an Establishment Clause challenge to the Texas pledge of allegiance. In 2007, the Texas legislative added the words “under God” to the state’s pledge. In evaluating the Establishment Clause claim, the court relied in part on the endorsement test, which asks whether a reasonable person, aware of the history and context of the challenged practice, would conclude that the government was endorsing religion. The Fifth Circuit held that a reasonable person would “conclude that the pledge remains a patriotic exercise” and that the new version “acknowledges but does not endorse religious belief.” Most courts to decide the issue have agreed with the Fifth Circuit.

I do not. Am I an unreasonable person? Before you answer, consider some feminist critiques of another reasonable person standard – specifically the reasonable person standard in Title VII sexual harassment cases. Early sexual harassment plaintiffs would have their claims dismissed when courts held that a reasonable person would not find that the work environment was hostile or abusive. For example, a court dismissed a claim even though it conceded that the humor in the workplace was “rough-hewn and vulgar” and that sexual jokes and “girlie magazines” were plentiful.

Feminist commentators identified three problems with these early sexual harassment decisions. First, feminists noted that due to societal inequalities that affected men’s and women’s life experiences, men and women have different perceptions of what constitutes harassment. For example, because women are at much more risk of sexual violence than men, sexual conduct that may seem like harmless fun to reasonable men can seem like a threat of violence to reasonable women. Second, feminists pointed out that the courts tended to equate the reasonable man’s reaction with a reasonable person’s reaction, and that this male norm was invisible to the usually male judges applying it. In other words, judges were unaware that they were presenting a subjective male perspective as an objective universal perspective. Third, the failure to recognize use of the unstated male norm perpetuated male privilege and power asymmetries instead of rectifying them – the actual goal of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Each of these critiques applies equally to the Fifth Circuit’s analysis of “under God” in the pledge. First, just as your sex may inform your evaluation of sexual harassment, your religion may matter when evaluating government endorsement of religion. The phrase “under God” may seem perfectly harmless and totally nonsectarian to Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and Greek Orthodox. Such a reading is less likely if you are a Hindu, or a Buddhist, or an atheist, however, and do not worship or believe in God.

Second, the reasonable person in current Establishment Clause analysis is really a person belonging to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Like the unstated male norm in early sexual harassment evaluations, this unstated norm is presented as the universal, objective norm and is often invisible to those applying it. Thus, the Fifth Circuit can concede that a state reference to God “may not reach every belief system” but nonetheless still characterize it as “tolerable attempt at acknowledging religion without favoring a particular sect or belief.”

The third feminist insight — that the failure to recognize the unstated norm perpetuates power asymmetries and privilege — is also true here. Just as tolerance of sexual harassment made it easier to exclude women from the workplace and reinforced their second-class status, the proliferation of state invocations of God makes it easier to exclude religious outsiders from the political and social community and reinforces their second-class status. Yet one of the major goals of the Establishment Clause is supposed to be to protect religious minorities from precisely this result.